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In a time of shrinking newsrooms, newspaper closings, fake news, alternative facts and outrage, and incursion from outsiders, why does professional journalism matter anymore? How can journalists, looking to defend their profession and the news they produce, claim authority over truth and fact? Michael Schudson engages these questions in Why Journalism Still Matters, a collection of writings on the value of today’s journalism for today’s democracy.

Using data from interviews with self-identified climate change skeptics, it becomes clear that there is a public misperception about climate change skepticism. Skeptics are concerned about pollution, support environmentally friendly policies, and oppose continued reliance on oil. Current climate change communication is problematic; here, we explore the policies that garner skeptics’ support.

Research on the dynamics of social change is often framed by what Damon Centola refers to in his new book How Behavior Spreads: The Science of Complex Contagions as “the convenience of classical epidemiological tropes” (p. 173) in which “contagions” spread from infected to susceptible individuals through interaction. Social networks became alluring to use in conjunction with this epidemiological frame because the two together evoke the determinism of electrical wiring, with charges traveling paths (ties) structured by the location of switches (nodes) in the line.

This article expands on my presidential address to further bolster the case that sociology has, from its inception, been engaged in social justice. I argue that a critical review of our discipline and our Association’s vaunted empiricist tradition of objectivity, in which sociologists are detached from their research, was accomplished by a false history and sociology of sociology that ignored, isolated, and marginalized some of the founders.

Standard narratives on the relationship between art and urban development detail art networks as connected to sources of dominant economic, social, and cultural capital and complicit in gentrification trends. This research challenges the conventional model by investigating the relationship between grassroots art spaces, tied to marginal and local groups, and the political economy of development in the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen. Using mixed methods, I investigate Do‐It‐Yourself and Latinx artists to understand the construction and goals of grassroots art organizations.

When hundreds of thousands of protesters filled the streets of Hong Kong this summer, central figures reportedly took no selfies, avoided Facebook and Twitter, installed prepaid SIM cards, stuck to secure messaging apps, and used cash instead of rechargeable subway cards or other cashless payments. It is not clear whether this will help them avoid “conspiracy to commit public nuisance” charges, which led to prison sentences for leaders of the 2014 Umbrella movement (including sociologist Kin-man Chan).

This study uses participant observation to examine how an all‐female collective in Los Angeles uses urban cycling culture as a way to contest inequalities and advocate for social change in communities of color. Bridging the literatures on gentrification and social movements, I examine how the collective uses the bicycle as a unifying tool to draw disparate individuals together and, through the group's practices and rituals, generates a shared sense of collective identity and politicized consciousness embedded within the uneven spatial development of Los Angeles.

Assessing changes in socialization values for children provides a unique window into how Americans perceive the landscape of their society. We examine whether, since the mid-1980s, Americans (1) emphasized survival values, like hard work, for children, as economic precarity rose or (2) prioritized self-expression values, like autonomy and compassion, as expected in postindustrial society.

This article explores the relationship between hardships and protest in the world-system. Despite the history of discussion of anti-systemic protest, there has been little work that differentiates world-systems contributions to social movement research from others who examine social movements. We contribute to a theory of anti-systemic protest by re-introducing hardships as a crucial element that defines inequalities in the world-system; one consistent source of those hardships are austerity policies imposed in response to debt negotiations.